Virginia Reeves - Work Like Any Other

“There,” Ed says. “Do you feel that, Ross?”

I look out the window, trying to catch a change in the glow of the bulbs. Are they weaker? Quieter? They are unchanged.

“What are you feeling, Ed?”

“My feet.” The bunk rattles. He shakes out his legs, kicking. Now, his hands. He’s making too much sound for the hour. His arms and legs thunder.

We both have low bunks, and I am level with him, level with his noise. “Quiet, Ed. Hank’s on row tonight.” Hank is a night guard known to beat the noise right out of a man. He likes silent cells. If he doesn’t get them, we are all rattled awake by his hammering and shouts.

I’m surprised the noise hasn’t woken our cellmates.

Ed steadies his body. “What are the lights doing, Ross?”

“They’re holding.”

“You’d have done it, wouldn’t you?”

He is asking whether I’d have made the chair. The question is an embarrassment. I didn’t tell him about my offer to the parole board.

“Yes. I would have done it.”

The light from the guard tower passes again.

Before dawn, the warden and a guard come for Ed. Not a bit of light is in the east. We haven’t slept. The light has passed eleven times since Ed’s shaking. I don’t know what to call this thing I watched in him. Nothing in my mind can explain the current that jumped from DeVaughn to Ed, that ran itself along the walkway from the detention house, into the main house, and up here to our sixth floor, to tap only Ed, not the man over him, not me next to him. Is it DeVaughn’s blood calling?

“Mason,” the warden says. “It’s time, now.”

“You kill him, sir?” Ed asks.

“Without a problem.”

Ed is not moving. “How long did it take, Warden?”

“Don’t see that that’s any of your business, son. You want your furlough or don’t you? I’m only offering once.”

Ed swings his feet to the floor. He pulls my letters from under his pillow, taps them against his knee. “I’ll let you know when they’re delivered.”

I nod.

“You’ll get yourself out of here, Ross.” He names all the ways like he does. My own furlough. Early parole. “You’ll see Marie and Gerald, soon.”

I don’t believe him.

“Ross.” Ed stands, his hand outstretched.

“Ed.” I stand, too. We shake. He has been a good man to know.

“Let’s go,” the warden says. “Martin, back in your bunk.”

I lie down and watch Ed’s back. The keys in the cell door clang, and the bars swing out. It’s a great sound, that of a cell door opening. Even though it’s nearly identical, the sound of a cell door closing is as ugly and lonesome a sound as we get in here. The door settles with its clang. The guard bolts it shut, hangs his keys from his hip, and follows Ed and the warden. The men are quiet. It is still dark. The day Horace DeVaughn died has not yet started for them.

It has for me, though, and for Ed. I wonder if I would’ve felt the death if those wires had been mine. Would DeVaughn have run his last breaths through my veins, a throbbing rhythm that skewed my pulse?

I did not feel George Haskin. He does not call.

Ed holds Marie’s letters in his hand. He will carry them out those front doors. He’ll walk into Montgomery and hitch a ride down to Coosa County. I see him in the open bed of a pickup truck. The morning air will be cool, and he will love the sting of it on his face. Wind like we don’t know in here, kicked up strong from moving fast down roads. He’ll look at the map I’ve drawn him, recognize the turnoff at the pecan orchards, and tap on the cab of the truck. “This’ll do,” he’ll tell the man driving. “I thank you, sir.”

He’ll carry those letters up the clay road to the farmhouse, Marie’s house. He’ll knock on the door, and Marie will answer. It’s still early when Ed arrives. Marie and Gerald are just sitting down to a breakfast Moa cooked. Corn cakes and ham and rich, dark coffee.

“Oh,” Marie says. “A friend of Roscoe’s? Come in. And letters? Where have they been? We’ve been waiting.”

Gerald shakes Ed’s hand the way I once taught him, firm and strong.

Wilson is already fed. He is out on the farm. He is in the barn working on a plow. He is repairing fence along the north pasture. He is walking rows, looking for signs of pest or disease. He is there, having escaped the mines — a quick run one night from his bunk, his papers long lost so nobody could track him.

The farm has stalled, going back a decade. They’ve gotten plow horses and mules, and they are barely getting by. This is how it must be without electricity, without power.

Ed eats quick, and he does not stay. Marie and Gerald wave him good-bye from the porch. Marie sits down to read my letters — every one of them — then she picks up paper and pen to respond. She writes for days, stopping only to shove paper into envelope, and envelope into the hand of a boy she’s hired for delivery. That boy brings them directly here. He walks into Kilby’s front offices and says, “Mail for Roscoe T Martin. I have directions to deliver it in person.”

“Right this way,” the warden says.

They find me in the barn mucking and milking, or in the library shelving. I’ll give the boy a few coins for his trouble, and Bondurant and Rash will lend me the afternoons for reading.

I will get my early parole, as Ed said I would, and I will go home to Marie and Gerald, and we will be as we never were — my time here in Kilby repairing us without our knowing.

Ed will catch a train to the Atlantic Ocean. “Atlantic Ocean,” he’ll say at the ticket window. “Quickest route you’ve got.” He’ll pay for his ticket with cash he earned in here. The man behind the glass will notice Ed’s missing thumbnail. He’ll notice the way Ed’s fingers crack along their edges, how they crack but don’t bleed. That man will never guess that those hands belong to Ed Mason, the man who built Alabama’s first electric chair. He’ll brush those hands, this ticket man in his booth. He’ll touch Ed’s hands as they make their exchange, and he won’t know what he’s touching.

I will never see Ed again, and it is still not morning.

INthe library, Rash says, “You sure are quiet today, Mr. Martin.” The events of last night feel as though they occurred months ago, years.

“I couldn’t find sleep.”

“You weren’t alone there.”

I picture Rash unable to sleep in his tiny village home. Was he thinking about Horace DeVaughn’s death, and with it, Ed’s departure? Like me, was he searching for a flicker in the lights?

In answer, he says, “Mason will be back before you know it.” His voice lulls as though to soothe a boy whose best friend’s gone on holiday. Is my isolation that clear?

“Right,” I say, wheeling away the shelving cart. I will suffer Ed’s absence on my own.

Today’s returned books are mostly fiction, barely read by the look of their date stamps. I slide them into their spots, something flimsy in their labels — that giant F , with the first three letters of the author’s last name. They are missing the balance of numbers.

I’ve moved over to the nonfiction, the 000s with their reference books. All of the dictionaries have pages torn loose. I can’t trace a pattern. Sometimes, it’s a page from the P ’s, other times from the M ’s, the A ’s, the C ’s. There are words these men must know and love enough to possess, which is hopeful, I think. Every time I replace a dictionary, I flip through it, trying to find the page I’d tear out. It will come to me, I’m sure.

Rash doesn’t seem to mind too much this destruction of library property. He includes new dictionaries with every book order.